Climate Risk Management (Jan 2023)
Assessment of adaptation practices for risk minimization to drought in semi-arid environments
Abstract
India is one of the most drought prone countries in the world and droughts are impacting agricultural production and livelihoods. Building resilience of agriculture has become important in view of the large-scale impacts of climate change and quantification of resilience is essential for objective assessment of technologies and systems for their performance. The focus of the study is to assess the impact of technologies in alleviating the impact of drought and to operationalize the concept of resilience to climatic stress. Two indices, resilience score, which indicates the performance of the technology during stress vis-à-vis the farmers’ practice during normal rainfall year and resilience gain, which indicates the performance of technology over that of the farmers’ practice during the stress year were used for assessing resilience. Location specific climate resilient technologies are adopted as a part of the ongoing project (National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA-since 2011)) and the extent of resilience achieved due to adoption of technologies is assessed with reference to drought occurred in 2016–2017 by collecting data from 113 households from two villages representing prevalent production systems of the villages vis-a-vis during the normal rainfall year (2015–16). Statistical significance of the impact of technologies adopted was ascertained using independent sample t-test and dummy variable regression technique. Drought has significant negative impact (p < 0.01) and decreased the production by 85% and income by 93%. Adoption of technologies resulted in yield and income gain (p < 0.01) during normal and drought years. Resilience score due to adoption of drought escaping cultivars ranged from 45 to 88% and 72 to 121% from livestock related technologies. Resilience gain due to climate smart technologies ranged from 15 to 118% over the farmers’ practice. Adoption of multiple farm enterprises enhanced income during drought and resilience. There is a need to encourage and support adoption of promising technologies for enhancing resilience and to minimize drought risk.
